Conversant Debuts Personalized Video, Enhanced By Epsilon Data

After hinting it would bring more video inventory to market, Conversant acted on that promise Tuesday with the launch of a Personalized Video suite.

With Personalized Video, the company aims to link desktop and mobile video messages with both online behavioral attributes and offline sales data.

Because of its roots with display retargeter Dotomi, a big Criteo competitor, and its stable of retailer relationships, Conversant processes close to 2 billion transactions per month and can onboard and anonymize first-party, SKU-level data, said Raju Malhotra, SVP of products at Conversant.

In addition it can tap into a pool of 150 million anonymous consumer profiles, each representing 19 cookies, three or more devices and three email addresses on average, which Malhotra claimed helps marketers persistently identify their customers across devices.

“We’re now taking advantage of Epsilon data sets from various verticals, which helps us build one view of the consumer,” Malhotra said. He noted the expansion of Conversant’s data assets by overlaying Epsilon data is conducted anonymously and within a tight privacy framework.

Although Conversant does not categorize the Personalized Video suite as a video demand-side platform, its platform, tailored for mobile and display, previously lacked complete video execution capabilities.

Last winter, Conversant added to its tech stack (which includes an ad server, DSP and tag manager, among other tech) by acquiring SET Media, a small video ad platform that served as one of the building blocks for Personalized Video. Malhotra said SET Media’s technology used machine learning to crawl a video file and identify what objects, celebrities or brand logos appeared in videos and what was resonating with a viewer.

“That information helps us place the most relevant video ads next to the most relevant contextual content,” he said. “We’ve evolved our personalization technology where we can do millions of [creative] expressions per day, overlaying different text, images and calls to action based on insights from our large scale of consumer profiles.”

Conversant’s platform has supply-side integrations to 25 of the large RTB exchanges with 2,700 demand-side clients, including brand-direct, agency trading desks and other DSPs.

Last winter, it rolled out a private exchange called Conversant Private Exchange with hooks into 6,000 publishers like the Los Angeles Times and Washington Times.

“This gave us exclusive, direct publisher relationships for mobile, display and video,” Malhotra said. “With our scale on the demand side, we can monetize their inventory in a very effective way.”

Personalized Video is generally available today and a large automaker and two specialty retailers are beta testing the platform, the company said.